Video compression is used in a variety of products. Video compression is used in digital television set-top boxes, digital satellite systems, high definition television (HDTV) decoders, digital versatile disk (DVD) players, video conferencing, and other digital video applications. Video compression allows an image of video content to be compressed by removing non-essential features of the video content. Compressing video content reduces the storage area needed to store the content. Compressed video content may be transmitted faster than uncompressed video content because compressed video content contains less data than uncompressed video content.
Video compression/decompression algorithms perform several operations on an image of video content when compressing or decompressing the image. For example, one step during compression may include transforming the image from a spatial domain to a frequency domain using a discrete cosine transform. The transformed image is then quantized. The image can be encoded to reduce the amount of data needed to represent the image; however, encoding reduces the precision of the image. The image can be encoded using variable length decoding. Variable length decoding uses more bits to encode less commonly occurring symbols than are used to represent more commonly occurring symbols. Symbols are representations of bit values of the image. A decoder can recreate the image by performing steps similar to the encoding process in reverse. A better way of encoding and/or decoding images may be desired.